Te Whatu Ora Enrolments and Eligibility Contact Centre proposed revised process

The Enrolments and Eligibility Contact Centre has proposed a revised process for verifying identity information, such as name or gender changes, or where two individuals’ identities may have accidentally been overlayed. The revised process will allow the contact centre to send an email to the practice manager requesting the clarifying information.

Historically the contact centre would call the practice associated with the NHI’s enrolment to clarify details. However, they are unable to do this as some practices are no longer accepting calls, or decline to provide information over the phone, and there is a backlog of identity matters to be addressed. 

The Te Whatu Ora Privacy Team has approved the following.

1. An email is allowed to be sent for the purpose of verifying identity information changes to a confirmed email address for the practice.
2. Each request can only contain an NHI and only the identity information necessary for clarification (i.e. there is to be no clinical information).
3. There should only be one individual per email (i.e. multiple patient details cannot be in one email to the practice except for investigating potential duplicate NHIs and matters of potential identity overlay).
4. In some challenging cases, the contact centre may request your support to obtain and supply copies of official documents and/or signatures to help resolve identity and eligibility matters. Any such documents will be destroyed following the task completion.
5. Any email returned from practices must be deleted from the mailbox following task completion. 

To achieve the above, Te Whatu Ora request practices update them with the email address they wish to be contacted on.